Biomedical supervisors’ role modeling of open science practices

Abstract

Supervision is one important way to socialize PhD candidates into responsible research. We hypothesized that one should be more likely to identify responsible research practices (here publishing open access and sharing data) in empirical publications that were part of a PhD thesis when the PhD candidate’s supervisors engaged in these responsible research practices compared to PhD candidate’s supervisors who did not or rarely did. Departing from PhD thesis repositories at 4 Dutch University Medical centers, we included 211 pairs of supervisors and PhD candidates, resulting in a sample of 2062 publications. Wedetermined Open Access status using UnpaywallR and Open Data using Oddpub, where we also manually screened publications with potential open data statements. Eighty-three percent of our sample was published openly, 9% had open data statements. Having a supervisor that shared data was associated with 2.09 (CI:1.13-3.89) times the odds to share data compared to having a supervisor that did not. This odds ratio increased to 3.65 (CI:1.46-9.16) after removing false positives. The prevalence of open data in our sample was comparable to international studies; open access rates were higher. Whilst PhD candidates spearhead initiatives to promote responsible research, this study adds value by investigating responsible supervision in the context of Open Science.